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The Game: You Never Play Alone, the latest Tamil series that was released on Netflix, would constantly make you wonder how this series ended up on that platform. The level of spoon-feeding explanation done through dialogues in this series is excessively high. In many ways, The Game felt like a lame crash course for those who are not at all aware of the traps of the internet. There is a grandmother character in this series, and the dumbing down of information was such that I felt she was the target audience of this series.
So, a game developer named Kavya, who is also a positivity-spreading influencer, is our main character. She is married to Anoop, who is also a game developer, and he already has a successful game on his resume. Kavya manages to get an award for delivering the best game of the year, but subsequently, she gets attacked, and she doesn’t remember much about the whole thing. The efforts of Kavya and the police to find out who is behind this attack are what we see in this series.
Written by Deepthi Govindrajan, the main thread of this series is extremely generic. Every revealing point in this series has zero freshness, and it is almost like the background score is trying to make the endings of episodes feel like cliffhangers. Deepthi wants misogyny to be the force that guides the whole thriller. But the problem is, it is not like the audience gets the idea of misogyny after sitting through a taut thriller. From the very first episode, when we see this interview of Kavya or the way the superior officer talks to the female police officer who handles the case of Kavya, at every point, Deepthi is adding this woman’s problem into the narrative. And when we finally figure out that the reason for this whole mess was also a fragile male ego, it looks more like a lack of creativity rather than creatively putting across an important issue.
Directed by Rajesh M Selva, the man who made movies like Thoongaa Vanam and Kadaram Kondan, the series lacks depth. The kind of questions Inspector Bhanumathi’s superior asks her about the case or the way Bhanumathi instructs her subordinates to do stuff made me wonder why my friends and I didn’t consider being in the Police force. Be it the police proceedings or the internal discussions in a game development company, everything is written to make it simple for the viewer who may not know how the dark web works or how a game is developed. The dialogues are so hammy almost everywhere that you would feel like asking Who talks like this? I mean, there are so many minimal and better ways to convey the emotion, “Thank you for being there for me.” The placements of twists and the construction of bad guys are so unimaginative.
Shraddha Srinath plays the lead role of this series, Kavya. The writing of the series in terms of character development is not at all helping her, and her dialogue delivery was also pretty stiff. The overdependence on dialogues is basically not allowing Shraddha to convey her emotions through natural performance. Santhosh Prathap, as Anoop, is also struggling to naturally deliver the lines. And even the emotional outburst of that character in certain scenes feels very artificial. Chandini Tamilarasan, as Inspector Bhanumathi, is also doing the daily soap-style loud acting. Hema is given the character of Kavya’s niece, and the writing makes that character excessively naive to convey its point. The bad guys in the movie are written so sloppily that neither their ideologies nor the performances of the actors who played those parts stay with you.
The Game: You Never Play Alone is basically an ad campaign with a good budget. And like I already said, the intention is to just create a sense of panic around the idea of trolls, internet scams, dark web, etc., to people who may be least interested in them. The Story here is far too basic, and to feel any sense of thrill while watching this Netflix series, you must have an alarming level of detachment from what is happening around you, which is not good. And also, how are debit cards and credit cards operating without pins or OTPs?
Review By: Digitpatrox